Version 10 is going GA with the usual fanfare that great marketing companies such as Veeam know how to orchestrate, but it’s different this time. Something is changing.
In the past, and despite our most respectful recriminations, Veeam would pre-announce new versions and sometimes over-hype their capabilities. Hard to stop the Veeam marketing machine when it’s in launch mode!! I have seen it both on the vendor side as a competitor (with secret admiration) and on the analyst side at ESG.
This time things are different. The whole launch process was carefully re-calibrated based on partner, customer, and analyst feedback. In order to avoid partner and customer fatigue, and to improve market (and sales) impact, it’s really much better to deliver what you announce within a few weeks. Veeam is clearly evolving in this respect, and we expect it will pay dividends.
Process is one thing; messaging and actual capabilities are another. We may look back at this version as a turning point for the platform. It’s very clear that Veeam is now gunning for the enterprise segment and is building its capabilities to better compete against incumbents in the space.
V10 has some strong features that, in combination, and with enhancements to the platform, make Veeam a more credible solution for the enterprise than before, with innovative capabilities for file/NAS backup at scale (there are billions of files across hundreds of thousands of NAS systems in the enterprise), Instant Recovery improvements, more integration with enterprise applications (that’s very key), and ransomware protection/remediation features.
There is still plenty of work and incumbents may argue that there is still a capabilities gap.
Yes, that’s true but…
- Capabilities evolve over time and you can easily be left behind, opening the door to new vendors…which is the essence of what Veeam did with VM protection – no market share is ever protected!
- Our research shows that enterprises have no problem using multiple vendors for backup and recovery. Veeam is already in many enterprise accounts by the way…
- Their strength in the channel (traditional, cloud and service providers, SIs) is undeniable and in our opinion the key to long-lasting success in the midmarket and the enterprise.
- There is a new investor focused on growth…
There are formidable vendors in the enterprise space for backup and recovery who have no intention of letting up…and the next big battlefield is in the much broader market of intelligent data management (data identification/classification, data reuse, compliance, etc.), which is a natural evolution of backup and recovery, as our research shows.
As I asked in other blogs before…who said the backup and recovery space is boring?
